Erosion is a natural process in which meteorological elements such as rain, wind, and snow remove soil, rock, and dissolved material from one location on the Earth's crust and transport it to another location. While such erosion is a natural process, certain localized human activity increases the rate of erosion to many times that at which erosion occurs naturally. Land surfaces adjacent man-made structures such as canals, roads, reservoirs and ponds, and artificially created drainage channels and other waterways are particularly susceptible to erosion because naturally occuring indigenous vegetation is removed in order to form the structures.
Erosion can be mitigated in these areas by remediation of the land surface adjacent the canal, road, or channel by planting vegetation to replace the vegetation that was stripped away during construction. However, there is a time interval between the planting of the replacement vegetation and the point at which the replacement vegetation is sufficiently developed to prevent further erosion of surface soil during which further erosion may occur.
Efforts have been made to retain the surface soil in place in these areas until such time as vegetation can mature to the point where the root structure of the vegetation retains the soil in place. An example of such material is the flexible mat structure disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,793,858 titled “Method and Apparatus for Forming a Flexible Mat Defined by Interconnected Concrete Panels,” the entire contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. That patent discloses a flexible mat structure in the form of spaced, interconnected concrete panels or blocks held together by an open mesh of a polymeric material.
The flexible mat structure may be made by depositing concrete in the block-shaped mold cavities formed in the surface of a rotating drum and embedding in the concrete material the open mesh structure. While the method is effective, there is a need to introduce additional efficiencies in the manufacture of such flexible mat structure.